Abstract
In the postwar landscape of the 1950s, American attitudes gained traction in Europe, prompting ambivalence on the part of Europeans. These mixed feelings can be characterized roundly as a love-hate relationship with American design. Few European intellectuals expressed that ambivalence more poignantly than the young Norwegian writer Jens Bjørneboe in his aptly titled essay, “The Fear of America within Us” (“Frykten for Amerika i oss”): “While Russia bids us the prospects of hell on earth—here and now, the U.S.A. can serve up paradise on earth. But in this paradise, when one has lived there for a while, one must put makeup on the apples and oranges in order to spot them. Life must be technicolorized.”1 Having traveled to the U.S., Bjørneboe had first-hand experience of the spectacle of abundance that American consumer society represented, but he feared the consequences of American cultural dominance. Similarly, the mythical notion of “America” represented both fears and desires to European design communities.
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Notes
Jens Bjørneboe, “Frykten for Amerika i oss,” Spektrum 5–6 (1952): 373.
Reprinted in Jens Bjørneboe, Norge, mitt Norge: Essays om formyndermennesket (Oslo: Pax, 1968), 213–22.
Victoria de Grazia, Irresistible Empire: America’s Advance through Twentieth-Century Europe (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2005).
Adrian Horn, Juke Box Britain: Americanisation and Youth Culture, 1945–60 (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 2009);
Siv Ringdal, Det amerikanske Lista: Med 110 volt i huset (Oslo: Pax, 2002).
Thomas Hine, Populuxe (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1986).
Hugo Lindström, “Min tid med Ralph Lysell og Alvar Lenning,” in Svensk industridesign: En 1900-talshistoria, ed. Lasse Brunnström (Stockholm: Prisma, 1997), 86–103.
They also met, for example, Frank Lloyd Wright, Louis Kahn, Alexander Girard, Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, and Walter Gropius. Grete Prytz Kittelsen interviewed in Karianne Bjellås Gilje, ed., Grete Prytz Kittelsen: Emalje og design (Oslo: Gyldendal, 2007), 57.
Åke H. Huldt, “Industrial Design,” in Nordenfjeldske kunstindustrimuseum—Årbok 1951, ed. Thorvald Krohn-Hansen (Trondheim: Nordenfjeldske kunstindustrimuseum, 1952), 51.
Nina Berre, “Fysiske idealer i norsk arkitekturutdanning 1945–1970” (PhD diss., Norwegian University of Science and Technology, 2002), 154.
Odd Brochmann, Rent Bord: En historie om funksjonalismen og funksjonalistene i Norge (Oslo: Arkitektnytt, 1987), 41–7.
Odd Brochmann, “Brukskunst for folket,” Bonytt 20 (1960): 41–3.
Arthur Hald, “Om Amerikansk Form,” Form 10 (1953), 221.
Kjetil Fallan, “How an Excavator Got Aesthetic Pretensions: Negotiating Design in 1960s’ Norway,” Journal of Design History 20 (2007): 44.
For a case study exploring this issue, see Kjetil Fallan, “The Realpolitik of the Artificial: Strategic Design at Figgjo Fajanse Facing International Free Trade in the 1960s,” Enterprise and Society 10 (2009): 559–89.
Richard Pells, Not Like Us: How Europeans Have Loved, Hated, and Transformed American Culture since World War II (New York: Basic Books, 1997), 84;
Greg Castillo, Cold War on the Home Front: The Soft Power of Midcentury Design (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2010), 118.
During the 1950s, at the request of various U.S. government agencies, MoMA organized several design exhibits that would tour Europe. For more information on some of these examples, see Gay McDonald, “Selling the American Dream: MoMA, Industrial Design and Post-War France,” Journal of Design History 17 (2004): 397–412;
Gay McDonald, “The ‘Advance’ of American Postwar Design in Europe: MoMA and the Design for Use, USA Exhibition 1951–1953,” Design Issues 24 (2008): 15–27.
Edgar Kaufmann, Jr., “Moderne formgivning i De Forenede Stater,” in Amerikansk form: En samling håndverks- og industrivarer sammenstillet av Museum of Modern Art, New York (Oslo: Foreningen brukskunst, 1954), 5–8.
Thorbjørn Rygh, “‘Amerikansk Form,’” in Nordenfjeldske kunstindustrimuseum—Årbok 1953, ed. Thorvald Krohn-Hansen (Trondheim: Nordenfjeldske kunstindustrimuseum, 1954), 14. The same denunciation of streamlining was later made by Ferdinand Aars in an English-language booklet promoting Norwegian design published by the Royal Norwegian Ministry of Foreign Affairs’ Office of Cultural Relations.
Ferdinand Aars, Arts and Crafts—Industrial Design in Norway (Oslo: The Royal Norwegian Ministry of Foreign Affairs, 1957), 7.
Gay McDonald, “The Modern American Home as Soft Power: Finland, MoMA and the ‘American Home 1953’ Exhibition,” Journal of Design History 23 (2010): 387–408.
Alberto Rosselli, “Incontro alla realtá,” Stile Industria 3 (March 1955): 1–2.
See also Kjetil Fallan, “Heresy and Heroics: The Debate on the Alleged ‘Crisis’ in Italian Design around 1960,” Modern Italy 14 (2009): 261.
Alec Davies, “Editorial,” Design 42 (December 1952): 2.
Patrick Maguire, “Craft Capitalism and the Projection of British Industry in the 1950s and 1960s,” Journal of Design History 6 (1993): 101.
Jeffrey L. Meikle, Design in the USA (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), 138–73.
Joy Parr, Domestic Goods: The Material, the Moral, and the Economic in the Postwar Years (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1999).
Claire Catterall, “Perceptions of Plastics: A Study of Plastics in Britain, 1945–1956,” in The Plastics Age: From Bakelite to Beanbags and Beyond, ed. Penny Sparke (Woodstock, NY: Overlook Press, 1993), 67–73.
Liv Ramskjær, “Users and Producers of Plastics in Post-World War II Norway: Building a New Industry Through Transfer of Technology,” Comparative Technology Transfer and Society 3 (2005): 76–102;
Liv Ramskjær, “Plast i det moderne Norge: Introduksjon, gjennombrudd og spredning av plastprodukter i Norge 1930–1974,” in Volund 1999–2000: Plast i det moderne Norge, ed. Frode Weium (Oslo: NTM, 2001), 162–80.
Wenche Anette Johannessen, “Brukskunst-senteret PLUS: Per Tannums ønske om å etablere et designsentrum” (MPhil thesis, University of Oslo, 2000), 13–4.
An engaging account of the success of Danish furniture in the U.S. during this period can be found in: Per H. Hansen, “Networks, Narratives, and New Markets: The Rise and Decline of Danish Modern Furniture Design, 1930–1970,” Business History Review 80 (2006): 449–83.
Ingeborg Glambek, Det Nordiske i arkitektur og design—sett utenfra (Oslo: Arkitektens forlag & Norsk arkitekturforlag, 1997), 117–35.
Arne Remlov, ed., Design in Scandinavia: An Exhibition of Objects for the Home (Oslo: Kirstes, 1954), 5.
Jens Bjørneboe, “Vi som elsket Amerika,” Orientering, 1966. Reprinted in Jens Bjørneboe, Vi som elsket Amerika: Essays om stormaktsgalskap, straffelyst, kunst og moral (Oslo: Pax, 1970), 22–3.
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Fallan, K. (2015). Love and Hate in Industrial Design: Europe’s Design Professionals and America in the 1950s. In: Lundin, P., Kaiserfeld, T. (eds) The Making of European Consumption. The Palgrave Macmillan Transnational History Series. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137374042_7
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